Social media provides an Internet-based framework for people to create, share, and exchange user generated content in virtual communities. With the advance in mobile communication technologies and popularity, social media has become one of the major channels for people to communicate with each other and to publish user generated content. As social networking continues to gain popularity, the functions of social network websites have evolved from connecting maintaining social relations among individuals to providing more business oriented functions such as providing discussion forums for a group of individuals or organizations sharing some common interests in or issues with products or services.
Nonetheless, due to the nature of the social networks being started with social relations and thus the unique characteristics of social network websites, much of the dialog and conversations go unheard or unanswered by some real parties in interest even though a lot of dialog and conversations happen naturally in the social sphere. Many of the user generated content items contain business leads, but due to the sheer amount of information exchange, most of the business leads are lost in the sea of information exchange. For example, Twitter® averages 58 millions of tweets and 2.1 billion of Twitter search engine queries per day among 115 millions of Twitter users in May 2013. Although some social media networks have started grouping users with similar interest into communities, it is nonetheless close to a complete impossibility to ask human beings to sift through such a huge amount of information sharing and exchange on a daily basis to identify such business opportunities, much less materializing such business opportunities using direct marketing vehicles. Therefore, there is a need for a method and a system for analyzing social media with trained intelligent systems to enhance direct marketing opportunities.